Former bricklayer here. Most working class people (like most middle-class people) are disgusted by the comments coming from Reform UK figures caught on camera by ITV. Bigoted privately educated multimillionaire far-right wanker Nigel Farage doesn't give a solitary shit about working class people. Nor does bigoted privately educated multimillionaire far-right wanker Rupert Lowe.

🧵 What, like riots in Liverpool and Cardiff in 1919? Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958? Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side and Handsworth in 1981? Brixton and Broadwater Farm in 1985? Brixton again in 1995? Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in 2001? Tottenham, Birmingham, Manchester, Salford and Liverpool in 2011? Knowsley in 2023? Southport, Rotherham and Tamworth in 2024? Ballymena in 2025? Kemi Badenoch has warned that Britain risks French-style civil unrest unless immigration controls are tightened, a message the Telegraph boiled down to “cut migration or risk France-style riots”. But Britain doesn’t need to look across the Channel. It has its own long, well-documented history of rioting, most of it investigated at the time, and very little of it supports the idea that migration is what sets the country alight. Start with the most recent. In the summer of 2024, after three young girls were murdered at a dance class in Southport, false claims spread online that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker. He was born in Britain. Within a day the town’s mosque had been pelted with bricks. Disorder spread across England, and on 4 August crowds attacked hotels housing asylum seekers in Tamworth and in Rotherham, not far from where I live. South Yorkshire Police said the Rotherham hotel was full of terrified residents and staff. The year before, in Knowsley, a protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers ended with a police van attacked with hammers and set alight, after rumours and misinformation had circulated on social media. In June 2025 it was Ballymena. After two local 14-year-old boys were arrested over an alleged sexual assault, masked crowds spent several nights attacking police and the homes of migrant families. Filipino families fled. A leisure centre in Larne that had briefly sheltered some of them was set on fire. The police called it racist thuggery. The pattern is a century old. In 1919, white mobs in Britain’s port cities turned on Black, Arab and Chinese seafarers and their communities. In Liverpool a Black ship’s fireman, Charles Wootton, was chased into the docks and drowned. In 1958 white crowds in Nottingham and then Notting Hill attacked West Indian residents and petrol-bombed their homes, egged on by Mosley’s Union Movement and the White Defence League. Notting Hill Carnival grew out of the response. In each of these riots, migrants and minorities were the targets of the violence. The second great strand in Britain’s riot history is policing. In April 1981 Brixton erupted after a heavy stop and search operation. Lord Scarman’s inquiry found the disorder was a spontaneous outburst of built-up resentment, rooted in social and economic disadvantage and a collapse of trust in the police. Toxteth, Moss Side and Handsworth followed that summer. In 1985 police shot and paralysed Cherry Groce during a raid on her Brixton home, and Brixton rioted again. A week later Cynthia Jarrett died during a police search of her Tottenham home, and the Broadwater Farm estate exploded. PC Keith Blakelock was killed. In 1995 Brixton rioted once more after Wayne Douglas died in police custody. Then came 2011. Mark Duggan, who grew up on Broadwater Farm, was shot dead by police in Tottenham, and over five nights rioting and looting spread across English cities. Five people died. The LSE and the Guardian interviewed 270 rioters and found anger at the police, especially humiliating stop and search, was a major factor. The government’s own panel found that 70 per cent of suspected rioters came from the 30 per cent most deprived areas, and pointed to youth unemployment, consumerism and parenting. Neither said anything about cutting migration. These are the real British parallels to France, where the big outbreaks of 2005 and 2023 followed deaths involving police, and where the current unrest began as protests over teacher shortages and crumbling classrooms....